Residents Statewide Worry About Nuclear-waste Dump

Residents Statewide Worry About Dump

July 11, 1991|By DENIS HORGAN;Courant Staff Writer

Copyright 1991, The Hartford Courant

The public is deeply concerned about the potential for problems with a proposed low-level nuclear-waste dump and has little trust in those who will assess the risks involved, a Courant/Connecticut Poll shows.

Apprehension over the issue is consistent statewide and is not confined to communities where the final site might be located, the poll conducted by the Institute for Social Inquiry at the University of Connecticut shows.

Eighty-eight percent of the public feel such a dump would pose very serious or somewhat serious problems, the poll shows, while 8 percent feel potential problems are not so serious or do not exist.

"The public has strong opinions about this -- strongly negative," said the poll director, G. Donald Ferree Jr. "Seventy-nine percent has followed the matter. That is a very high rate, compared with most issues. That nearly nine of 10 are concerned indicates this would rank high on peoples' lists of serious issues."

In June, the Connecticut Hazardous Waste Management Service named two sites in Ellington and a third straddling the East Windsor-South Windsor line as finalists for a federally mandated disposal site for low-level nuclear waste. Residents there have organized major opposition to the decision.

The Courant/Connecticut poll conducted telephone interviews of 500 adult state residents between June 25 and July 1. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points, meaning a poll of all residents would probably produce results within that range. State residents express strong skepticism about the reliability of assessments of the risks involved in storing nuclear waste.

Seventy-six percent think private corporations involved with nuclear waste would understate the risks in such a project; 66 percent say the federal government would understate the risks, and 55 percent believe the state government would do so.

The public has more confidence in local government, with 36 percent believing their town officials would state the risks

accurately -- while 35 percent think even their community leaders would understate them.

Eighty-six percent would be very or somewhat upset if it had been decided to locate the dump in the respondent's town, the poll shows.

"If the NIMBY [Not in My Backyard] syndrome were the only one at work," Ferree said, "it might be expected that residents affected by the decision would be more upset than those whose neighborhoods weren't selected. But they are only modestly more concerned -- a few percentage points -- than those in other parts of the state. This is not a popular concept."

In many ways, public attitudes mirror the complexity of the problem. There is no strong consensus around any alternative proposal to a central site for the state's low-level waste: 37 percent believe waste should be stored at the site where it is generated, and 44 percent favor a central storage site. Half the poll's respondents support regional, multi-state storage sites, while 37 percent believe a state's waste should be kept within its borders.

Seventy-one percent of the public believe that a town should have the right to veto the siting of a dump within its borders, but 65 percent believe that the state ultimately should have the authority to designate a spot if no town voluntarily accepts one. Fifty-five percent oppose granting the federal government that authority.

Seventy percent of those polled feel states should be able to stop waste being transported across their borders, while 57 percent think towns should have that power.

"Some of this may have to do with degree of trust, along with a sense that -- for all the value of local voice -- the stuff has to go somewhere," Ferree said. "But no solution is particularly popular."